Autonomous cars left out of House infrastructure bill
WASHINGTON — The $1.5 trillion infrastructure package approved by the House last week was touted as an ambitious road map to the future — a boon to electric vehicles, broadband access, public transit and climate change mitigation projects.
Yet the 2,300-page bill had curiously little to say about autonomous vehicles, which proponents say will be a part of the country’s transportation networks and are already developed and tested on the streets of Pittsburgh.
Further, one of the only mentions of the industry came in the form of a last-minute provision to require a spate of new safety and reporting regulations that alarmed the industry — and spurred Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, to the House floor last week to oppose the language.
The infrastructure bill, drafted by House Democrats, is likely to go through the political wringer in the Republican-controlled Senate. Yet the disagreements were another sign of the difficulty of reaching a deal to provide federal oversight of a rapidly evolving tech sector whose research involves extensive testing, often on public roads.
“All of the companies operating here agree that we need to sit down and work together on what makes sense in terms of testing and regulations and how this whole process moves forward — but it needs to be a deliberative process,” Mr. Doyle said in an interview after the bill passed by a 233-188 vote.
Legislative efforts on a comprehensive autonomous vehicle bill, called the Self-Drive Act, have floundered in House and Senate committees for years.
Congress first waded into the issue in late 2016, shortly after Uber launched its self-driving test vehicles in Pittsburgh.
The Steel City has seen the rise of companies like Uber, Argo AI, Aurora and Aptiv that have built on decades of artificial intelligence research at Carnegie Mellon University.
Yet the technology’s heady promise of reducing car crashes and improving mobility has clashed at times with safety concerns and calls for public scrutiny, especially after an Uber test vehicle in Arizona struck and killed a pedestrian in March 2018.
As recently as February, lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee urged the passage of meaningful legislation, while also at times sparring with industry representatives. Long-standing differences involve how many test vehicles should be allowed on the road; who will be held legally liable in the event of an accident; and whether state and local laws can preempt federal standards.
The House infrastructure bill, called the Moving Forward Act, made no mention of the Self-Drive Act or those issues.
As originally written, the bill required only a federal working group to study “the ability of automated vehicles to safely interact with other road users” and draw up recommendations to prevent accidents.
Mr. Doyle said he supported the federal study — which was included in the final bill — but was blindsided by the new regulations.
The reporting requirements would require the U.S. Department of Transportation to create a federal repository to collect information on testing operations for commercial vehicles equipped with autonomous systems, like self-driving trucks and buses. Self-driving passenger vehicles, like those on the roads in Pittsburgh, would not be affected.
The provision was filed by Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, DCalif., before a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing last month on a new surface transportation bill.
But the amendment was never formally offered or discussed during a two-day markup hearing in which members voted on hundreds of amendments.
But the language reappeared in the broader infrastructure package as part of an amendment put forth by the transportation committee’s chair, Peter DeFazio, DN.Y.
“It caused some alarm within the community of companies that are operating not only here in Pittsburgh but across the country,” Mr. Doyle said. “Somehow it just got put in the manager’s amendment, and there was no debate or discussion about it and it got brought to the floor.”
A spokesperson for Mr. DeSaulnier said the congressman did not pursue the provision on the floor and referred questions to the committee. A spokesperson for the committee did not respond to a request for comment.
The industry opposed the amendment when it was filed last month and spoke out against it after it was approved as part of the infrastructure package.
In a letter last month, three self-driving truck ventures said the requirements would duplicate federal regulations that already exist for commercial vehicles and “would have a potential chilling effect” on testing and development.
The Consumer Technology Association, a Virginiabased trade association representing developers, objected to the requests for “extensive amounts of proprietary information,” including all routes and planned stops, detailed manifests of cargo and passengers and equipment malfunctions.
Much of the requested information “would be considered confidential business information, some of which doesn’t have any impact on safety,” said Jamie Boone, the CTA’s vice president of government affairs, in an interview.
She added the industry was disappointed the bill seemed to ignore autonomous vehicles.
“This would have been a really big opportunity to get an AV bill done and in here, and address a lot of the issues that are outstanding,” Ms. Boone said.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents truckers and other transportation workers, applauded the new requirements and called for more federal action.
“The promises of AV technology have continually failed to live up to the hype, as the safety of AV operations have not only been repeatedly overstated, but have also led to people being tragically killed,” said Sam Loesche, a Teamsters legislative representative.
“Basic oversight of these operations is sorely needed,” Mr. Loesche said.